NEW YORK – Canada could see more asylum seekers from Mexico because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, the U.N. and refugee advocates said.

Given Trump’s calls to build a wall along the Mexico border and to ban refugees, Mexican migrants may try to head straight to Canada, they said.

One scenario is “that people will  jump straight to come to Canada — by air, by plane — and launch an asylum claim here in Canada,” Jean-Nicolas Beuze, the head of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR in Canada said in a telephone interview.

“When the direct crossing into neighboring countries is made more difficult by administrative measures, new policies, new laws, or in this case a wall, people … look at other options,” he said.

Shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, Trump declared an executive order spelling out immigration restrictions that include a four-month ban on all refugees from entering the United States.

A federal judge in Seattle, in Washington state, on Friday temporarily blocked Trump’s order. But a federal appeals court was poised to hear arguments over whether to restore the ban on Tuesday afternoon.

Trump, a Republican, also wants to build a wall over the U.S. southern border to keep out Mexican migrants, a promise he made repeatedly as he campaigned.

At the Montreal-based TCRI, a coalition of non-profits providing services to refugees and immigrants, director Stephan Reichhold said grassroots groups assisting refugees were already seeing a surge of asylum seekers.

“Clearly there’s been a massive increase [of asylum seekers] since Jan. 20,” he said on Tuesday in a telephone interview conducted in French.

“Accommodation for asylum seekers in Montreal has been overflowing over the last few weeks.”

A recent tweet by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s in which he invited refugees to come to Canada also had “created an enthusiasm that will make [them] want to come to Canada,” Reichhold said.

Still, Ottawa remains bound by an accord with Washington, the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which it must refuse asylum-seeking claims from people entering Canada from the United States, he said.

The number of Mexicans seeking asylum in Canada dropped sharply after a 2009 rule obliging Mexican visitors to obtain visas to crackdown on a flood on bogus refugee claims.